Are these the 7 best social media marketing tools?

Keeping up with the latest trends in social media management, just like every other cores of digital marketing, is hard enough. What you’d agree is harder is actually implementing your social media marketing strategies and tactics consistently – with “consistency” being the hardest part.

It usually takes some patience to get positive results from marketing generally. The most unfortunate thing that can ever happen to any marketer or businessperson is to commit to the time, energy, and other investments needed for a successful social media management campaign and still not get good results at the end of everything. This is however sadly the case for most marketers and business owners. They simply waste time on social media with no positive results to show for it.

What about finding a way to remove the hard and “sad” parts of social media marketing – the waiting and the failure, and instead find a way to ensure ease and effectiveness of social media management?

There are countless tools that can ease your social media stress and give you positive results in your campaigns. They’ll help you grow your followership and influence, help keep your followers engaged consistently, help expand your network and attract more influencers, and help you to never miss out on any discussion relevant to your business, amongst many other benefits.

But there are also hundreds of social media tools out there with serious vulnerabilities. With cyber attacks and hacking happening more often, it's important to take important precautions like only using trusted tools, reading their privacy policies, using a VPN and using the right pivacy settings on social media platforms.

I can’t possibly discuss every single social media tool out there with you, but I’ll be revealing some very great ones and show you how to use them to achieve your social media goals. Find them below:

1. Buffer

Definitely one of the most popular social media tools, Buffer isn’t widely known for nothing. This is the tool that will bring consistency and engagement to your social media management.

Buffer is an easy-to-use, one-stop solution that lets you create a posting schedule for all your social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, all in one spot.

You simple “queue” your posts inside Buffer, which will automatically share them to the various social media sites, based on your schedule (date and time) and settings.

Such time saver!

Where you have a long list of posts to schedule, you can use the Bulk Buffer tool to upload all at once.

2. Hootsuite

It’s become normal to see several Hootsuite v. Buffer comparisons around the internet, and that’s because they’re both content scheduling and publishing tools. However, Hootsuite is more extensive as it does more than just content scheduling and publishing, it’s a complete social media management platform.

With Hootsuite, you can do other social media activities like monitoring streams (keywords, hashtags, people, etc), engaging, and networking with influencers.

You can also autoschedule – where you let Hootsuite automatically choose the best posting time for you.

Lastly, Hootsuite has several other social platforms integrated to it, other than those 5 listed for Buffer.

3. Edgar

Edgar does almost the same thing Hootsuite and Buffer does, in terms of scheduling and publishing. The major advantage over both is the ability to repost content.

Social media is a platform where things move very fast, so your audience might miss your important updates on their feed, simply because they weren’t online for some time when you posted. It’s reasonable to repost same content at different times.

Other scheduling tools won’t allow you to automatically repost: you’d have to track what and when you posted manually so you can space and reschedule.

Edgar takes this hassle away and lets you schedule for reposting.

Another advantage Edgar has over others is the ability to add your posts into categories. You can then customize it to ensure that posts in one category are more shared than others.

4. Buzzsumo

When it comes to social influencing, content comes first to mind. And we aren’t talking just any content here, for your audience to be truly engaged, and for your social influence to grow over time, you must be reputed for sharing topnotch, highly engaging content.

BuzzSumo is one of the best tools around when it comes to content discovery. Though great for content marketing as it helps you discover what topic is trending and popular in your market, it’s also a great social media tool.

You can use BuzzSumo to determine what to share with your audience, based on what they already love – what is already popular in your space.

This can give you an idea for creating your own content of the same topic so you can share with your audience, or simply help you discover high-quality content you can curate and share with your followers.

You can discover popular topics either by searching a topic or by entering the URL of a website. Great for spying your competitor to know what content is popular among their audience.

5. Canva

These days there’s no good social media management without images. Posting text-based content every time will bore your audience with time. Plus, visual content are more engaging across social platforms.

If your budget won’t accommodate investing in a professional graphics designer, Canva will come to your aid. With its drag-and-drop features and tons of free templates, you can create good-enough, social-media-friendly images anytime you need one. Your audience will love you more and give you more social shares.

6. Mention

Social listening is as important as every other social media activity. You need to monitor mentions of your brand or industry-related keywords you’re interested in on social media.

With this you can join in on conversations going on online, and contribute your expertise to attract more followers – and business.

You can also offer quality customer service by appreciating praises and taking care of criticisms or complaints before they escalate.

Mention is the tool that helps you stay on top of your listening game and help you accomplish the above-stated points. It’s been rightly tagged the “Google Trends of social”.

7. FollowerWonk

While there are many tools to help you track the growth of followers, FollowerWonk is amongst the few that give you insight into who is following you and their social media activities, like the time they are active on social media.

FollowerWonk, though focused on Twitter, is a nifty social media analytics tool that will tell you when exactly to engage your followers better.

These are just 7 of hundreds of social media management tools out there, but using these – one after another – will definitely make a difference in your social media management, and the ensuing results.

Have I omitted your favorite social media tools? Please tell me about them in the comments and let’s get this discussion going on.